Tuesday, October 19, 2010

We don't work on fresh...

We put you up to this last month, remarking that the shit was more like Stan Brakhage or than the other homemade hiphop out there. It's as real as the 7th 8th and 9th strings on Big Joe Williams homemade axe: the realness of "I can't help myself. I need to hear that more a little more." To make it clear: this hits me up like AEC's "Barnyard Scuffle Shuffle," or Bert Williams "Nobody," or put something in that is out on the list.

In a recent exercise in tapping, chaboy Coates, who also earn his love and has the privilege of dropping science on the somewhat lacking and in need over @ The Atlantic talks about this, as he is wont, in autobiographical terms. "I am, it seems, always bidding adieu to the formative music of my youth. I am not bitter, but in the long kiss goodnight I hope to soon understand why and how I came, so powerfully, under the sway of two turntables and a microphone. Now, I am pushing past 35, and I offer these thoughts as a man who almost surely will never buy any of Big Sean's work. And this is as it should be. The music no longer belongs to me. Likely, it never did." Sentimental, but truetrue. He calls it hiphop. Over @ this house we call it the blues.

Let us be clear, though. This is not about the youth, or the fresh or any of that. It is about being displaced from what we do when we grind, and the subsequent illusory sense that we can return to where we used to be. Makes you want to holla, the they they do your mind.

What we love most about the Odd Future crew is how easy it is to see that they are taking the music away from us. And they got so much to take. We were lissening to Earl Sweatshirt @ the office the other day, letting it boom the 'buds while we ground our nose on this and that. The note is simple: blew the shit up outta the workplace. We hadda get a cup of coffee and regroup. Just took it all away w/ the holla, "It never was yours and it never was."

Get over there. Dwell in their house for a while. Pick up a few of the joints they leave around for you. Yours for the taking, right?